May 14th, 2023 – Keystone, South Dakota to Keystone, South Dakota: ~150 miles
Did you miss Day 2? We get introduced to the bikes and do a little scouting.
Today was our first shoot day, and we’d be sticking to the pavement because the trails in the Black Hills don’t open until tomorrow. But we had a problem – the BMW wasn’t running correctly. Sometimes it ran fine, but most of the time it was only running on one cylinder. Ryan had fixed the sticky throttle but this was clearly something else. He took it for a quick spin in the hopes that the the issue would clear itself out, and the BMW responded with this warning error:
I felt horrible – this was clearly due to my drop yesterday. We couldn’t determine what the issue was, but the guess was that water had somehow gotten into an electrical component. We didn’t have the tools required to take the bike apart and the closest BMW motorcycle dealership was in Sturgis, roughly 35 miles away…but today is Sunday and they’re not open. We speak with the person who manages BMW’s press fleet to explain the situation and after a lengthy conversation the decision was made to park the BMW. Now I felt even worse – the Motorcycle.com folks had spent time and resources getting these bikes to South Dakota for a story and because of a mistake I made, now they had to improvise. I told them I’d sit out the rest of the trip so that no one else would have to lose seat time, but they all said we’d figure something out. So we sat down for breakfast at the hotel, and my sadness was not alleviated by depressing discs of bland eggs and sausage with no hot sauce or ketchup. All good – we’re here to ride, not eat.
We start the day getting video passes of each bike – Chris filmed out of the back of a Suburban while being secured with ratchet straps.
Seeing as we were down to three bikes, Evans sat out for the morning to focus on getting still images. I quickly fell in love with the DesertX – ours was equipped with the new RR22 livery which is “inspired by that of the Audi RS Q e-tron that participated in the last Dakar.” I actually preferred the regular “Star White Silk” livery, but either way I was incredibly happy with the motor – V-Twins are the best. It also helped that the Ducati had heated grips in this inclement weather.
Photo by Evans Brasfield for Motorcycle.com
The rain was overwhelming today and affected a lot of our plans (including my ability to get cell phone photos), but we still managed to cover what we needed. We got a brief and welcome respite from the rain with lunch at a Subway in a strip mall. Inside the plaza was a Bolens Husky 1253 tractor – the 1253 model was from 1970 and it featured a 12 horsepower Tecumseh 453cc engine.
The afternoon was spent on the 14-mile-long Needles Highway. We had to keep our pace slow with the weather, but even with cloudy skies and wet pavement I could tell that it would be a fantastic ride through beautiful scenery. The “needles” are granite spires that shoot towards the sky in visually striking ways. The road was actually plotted out by Governor Peter Norbeck, who marked out the route via horseback and foot. It was completed 101 years ago.
The highlight of the ride was Needles Eye Tunnel, where the road becomes one lane.
As you can imagine, this was a great place to get photos and videos of the bikes. The video camera couldn’t get wet, so the cameraman’s sidekick had to protect it with an umbrella.
Yet again, Evans makes us all look good.
Photo by Evans Brasfield for Motorcycle.com
We were stunned to see a tourist bus enter the tunnel, but the driver did a hell of a job threading the needle.
We headed back to the hotel and stopped for a moment to check out Mt. Rushmore. The abundance of rain made it look like George Washington was crying, probably because of the horrible t-shirts that were made of his behind.
I got to enjoy this scenic moment with Ryan Adams, who has been awesome to ride with off-road because he’s so much faster than I am.
After dinner we were all walking back to our hotel and we saw a few sportbikes at a gas station. As soon as I got close, someone said “no way, Iconic?” It was a fan who was stoked to see us out in SD, and he was riding a fantastic Ducati 1199 Tricolore. Even better? His partner got her skydiving license and they are training for a jump where she hops out of a plane and lands on the back of his bike!
It was great to see a group of friends riding together on a Sunday evening, and I felt so honored that they knew Iconic Motorbikes. Thanks for the support!
Tomorrow we get to the fun stuff – we ride in the dirt and it looks like the sun’s coming out to dry things up a bit. There’s only one potential concern: the trails don’t open until tomorrow, so we are running the risk that we will get to certain gates before the rangers have a chance to open them up themselves. It should be interesting!